The spaghetti-tree hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast
on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme
Panorama, purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland
harvesting spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree". At the time
spaghetti was relatively little-known in the UK, so that many
Britons were unaware that spaghetti is made from wheat flour and
water; a number of viewers afterwards contacted the BBC for advice
on growing their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this
broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment
ever pulled."

Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger dreamed up the story after
remembering how teachers at his school in Austria teased his
classm…

The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous hoaxes in
American history, was a 10-foot-tall (3m) “petrified man” uncovered
on October 16, 1869 by workers digging a well behind the barn of
William C. “Stub” Newell in Cardiff, New York. Both it and an
unauthorized copy made by P.T. Barnum are still on display. The
Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull.
Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument
with a fundamentalist minister named Mr. Turk about a passage in
Genesis that stated that there were giants who once lived on
earth.

Hull hired men to carve out a 10-feet-long, 4.5 inches block of
gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a
monument of Abraham L…

The “Piltdown Man” is a famous hoax consisting of
fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel
pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex. The
fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the
fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human. The
Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni (“Dawson’s dawn-man”, after the
collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen.

The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax
in history. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention
paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more
than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its exposure as a
forgery. It was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, co…

In 1995, Ray Santilli instigated a wide reaching “alien
autopsy” controversy when he claimed to possess footage taken in a
tent by a U.S. military shortly after the 1947 Roswell UFO
incident. Santilli first presented his film to an invited audience
of media representatives, UFOlogists and other dignitaries at the
Museum of London on 5 May 1995. Although the broadcast version did
not show the actual “autopsy”, video editions have the complete and
unedited film, plus previously unreleased footage of wreckage
presented as the remains of the alien craft reported to have
crashed in Roswell. The show features interviews with experts on
the authenticity of the film.

The Protocol of the Elders of Zion is a text that
purports to describe a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world
domination. It is one of the most well known and discussed examples
of literary forgery. Numerous independent investigations have
concluded it to be either a plagiarism or a hoax. The Protocols is
widely considered to be the beginning of contemporary conspiracy
theory literature, and takes the form of an instruction manual to a
new member of the “elders,” describing how they will run the world
through control of the media and finance, and replace the
traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation.

Continued usage of the Protocols as an antisemitic propaganda
tool substanti…